Carmel, Mount (redirected from Mt Carmel)

Carmel, Mount (kär`məl) [Heb.,=garden land], mountain ridge, NW Israel, extending 13 mi (21 km) NW from the plain of Esdraelon to the Mediterranean Sea, where it ends in a promontory marking the southern limit of the Bay of Haifa. Its highest point is 1,792 ft (546 m), and it is one of the most striking physical features of Israel. Long an object of veneration, it was associated in biblical times with the lives of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. From the mountainside vineyards comes the renowned Mt. Carmel wine; there are also olive groves. At the foot of Mt. Carmel is the port of Haifa, with the city rising up along its slopes and at its top. On its slopes are a Baha'ist garden shrine, with the tombs of Bab-ed-din and of Abdul Baha (see Baha'i), and a 19th-century Carmelite monastery.

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Carmel, Mount 

a mountain in the northern part of Palestine (on the territory of the state of Israel). In 1929—34 human skeletal remains together with Levalloisian-type stone implements and the bones of fossil animals were discovered in the caves of Tabun and Skhul on Mount Carmel’s western slope. In the Tabun cave, an almost complete skeleton of a Neanderthal woman and the lower jaw of a male skull with a distinct chin prominence were found. In the Skhul cave, the bones of ten skeletons in varying states of preservation were found, characterized by great individual differences and by a combination of Neanderthal and modern features in the structure of the skull and other parts of the skeleton. The Tabun and Skhul populations lived 40, 000–45, 000 years ago. Some scholars consider the population of the Mount Carmel caves to be the result of the hybridization between Neanderthal man and the populations of modern type; others see them as an evolutionary transition from ancient man to modern man.

REFERENCES

Roginskii, Ia. Ia., and M. G. Levin. Antropologiia. Moscow, 1963.
McCown, T. D., and A. Keith. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, vol. 2.Oxford, 1939.